Richard Leader: a secret history of UB




			A place with enough people and enough time will generate stories that will echo throughout all of eternity. This Halloween season we bring to you three stories that time would rather forget. -Richard Leader [Printed in the 10/26/99 issue of Generation magazine text adapted from contemporary articles appearing in The Spectrum and Reach: The Student Guide to UB]










			October 1984. Murder in Governors. Early on a Sunday morning in October of 1984, a fight broke out between two roommates in 206B Roosevelt in the Governors complex. Both Ronald Longmire and his roommate, Richard Boulware suffered minor injuries in the conflict and were taken by Public Safety to the Ellicott Health Center and were then released. Soon after, six friends of Boulware, four of them still high school students, came into the room in Governors looking for Longmire. Forcing their way in with tire iron, they confronted Longmire and argued with him. The RA responded to the noise and called Public Safety, who did not arrive for at least 15 to 20 minutes. The six attacked Longmire, who managed to take hold of a kitchen knife in the melee, and fatally wounded Craig Allen. Allen, 18 years old, a non UB student was accompanying his brother, Scott, when they broke into the room. Craig Allen's body was discovered by a custodial worker at 9:37 AM in a maintenance room near 206 Roosevelt, being dead for hours at that point. Public Safety had no knowledge of his involvement in the incident and were about to begin a search for him when the corpse was discovered. It was reported that an autopsy revealed that he had died minutes after sustaining a stab wound to the heart. Longmire was left in legal limbo for several months and it was not until June of 1985 that he was finally found not guilty of murder.

			Mafia Invests in UB Jacobs Management Center has always been a place of business -- some of it a whole lot shadier than you might expect. The Jacobs, whom the center was named for, were a family of entrepreneurs who owned the Delaware North Companies (DNC), a multi-million dollar conglomerate which specialized in food concessions for sports and gambling facilities. In 1982 they donated $1 million to UB and endowed two chairs in the management school. Formerly known as Emprise Corporation, DNC was convicted in 1972 of conspiring to obtain secret ownership of the Frontier casino-hotel in Las Vegas. Two other alleged Detroit Mafia figures were also conviceted. A subsequent plea for a presidential pardon was refused. Over the years, periodicals such as Congressional Record, Sports Illustrated, and the Columbia Journalism Review have reported on over fifty years of DNC links to alleged Mafioso and other organized crime figures. In 1976, emprise -- DNC was linked to a car-bomb killing of Arizona Journalist Donald Bolles, who was investigating influence buying within the Arizona gambling commission. According to a May 1976 Time Magazine article, the reporter’s last words were “Mafia…Emprise…they finally got me…” Though one of the assassins was caught and convicted, the people who hired the killers have yet to be identified. How much blood money has been laundered in the construction of UB? We may never know.

			February 1987. Student Jumps, Falls, Down Clemens’ Stairwell Leo Yanus, a 21-year-old UB student plunged to his death down the center of Clemens’ south stairwell. Whether he jumped or fell remains unclear--a sneaker dropped seconds after he hit the ground. His classmates responded to the tragedy by leaving poetry at the place of his demise:
			when the boy jumped I heard railings and walls groan, and I heard girls screaming and a long, low groan. The thought as out of the edge a small white object like a dove knocked off by the force of the concrete floor. I ducked into a hallway, just over the edge, ten feet, a cinderblock corner, neck drinking a warm spring rain. Young gazed down arrested in their (hands tremble as I write this) and here was my chance. Supported the head, felt for, but unconsious and badly hurt, Backward C. His left leg hyperextended at that impossible draw you. The spine was shattered. A cloud of bystanders, banal and needless advice, “Ambulance, someone.” But he did a miracle… -- …I was on the second floor landing. A dull thumping as his body way down from the ninth floor. Then very distinctly from below. Goddamn stairs are falling, my vision something went past that later became a sneaker. Below me he lay, sprawled into, tilted back, as if he were drinking, Men and women -- his agemates -- stairclimb by his fall. I always wanted to be a hero, swift sure steps I reached him. A pulse. Yes he was alive. -- “Be all right,” I lied to him, “Be O.K.”